Lamentations

30 NOVEMBER-6 DECEMBER

Lamentations comprises five separate poems which grieve over the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of its temple in 587BC. Each poem has 22 verses (in chapter 3 they are set out as 66, but the length of the poem is the same as that of chapters 1 or 2). This corresponds to the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and in chapters 1-4 each verse begins with a different letter. The poems thus express grief from A to Z. Chapters 1-3 do not begin as prayers (they are not addressed to God) but they become prayers before the end. Chapter 4 is at no point explicit prayer; chapter 5 is prayer from the beginning. Chapters 1-2 and 4 are actually more like funeral laments: they are mourning the death of a city.
The poems have the two formal features of Hebrew poetry, parallelism and rhythm. Their parallelism means that lines usually divide into two halves; the second half restates or takes further or completes or contrasts with the first half. You can see different ways in which they do this if you look at each of the three lines of the first six verses of Lamentations 1. The first line of verse 7 then breaks the pattern; there are other 'rogue' lines through the book, but in general these poems are more regular than ones in the Psalms or the Prophets.
Their rhythm is also more consistent than other Hebrew poetry. Outside Lamentations, the most common rhythm involves each half of a line containing three important words and thus three stresses. The second most common rhythm involves three stresses in the first half but only two in the second, and this is how Lamentations works. The 3-2 rhythm is used for more lyrical poetry, especially for the expression of hurt. The effect is that the second half of the line always brings you up short—you expect it to be longer than it is. It feels incomplete—which is how life is, at the moment. You can generally see even from an English translation that the second half-lines in Lamentations look shorter than the first.

1    Miss Zion overthrown   Read Lamentations 1:1-13
The first poem makes more than do any others of the personification of Jerusalem as a woman. In other cultures a goddess such as Athene represented her city in heaven. In Israel that idea is demythologized. Yahweh does have a consort, but the consort is the city itself, bedecked with her jewels and crowned by her walls. In the case of Jerusalem, however, the wife has now become like a widow, the queen like a slave, the beloved friendless, the splendid humiliated, the honoured despised, the protected invaded. In the phrase 'daughter of Zion' the 'of is like that in a phrase such as 'City of London': it means 'Daughter Zion', 'Miss Zion'.
According to the previous page of the Old Testament (Jeremiah 52:28—30), the number of people who have actually been deported from the city is smaller than the poem might seem to imply. Poetic hyperbole is involved, but the language also reflects the fact that all the important people were taken—government, civil service, priesthood, and skilled workers. That would of course be enough to paralyse the city. Those who mourned its fate would be ordinary people such as farmers, whom the Babylonians intended to leave behind, and other leaders who escaped deportation.
In the Psalms, a lament of this kind would usually include a protest that the reversal which the city has experienced is unjustified; the community has done nothing to deserve the devastation it has experienced. In contrast to that, in Lamentations the poet invites the people to accept their calamity as the deserved outcome of their wrongdoing. In English Bibles, Lamentations follows Jeremiah, in deference to the tradition that Jeremiah was their author. There is no historical basis to the tradition, but the poems do take the kind of view that Jeremiah would have taken, that the city has done wrong and is stained by its wrong. In Old Testament thinking (as in our experience), it takes time for a stain to disappear.
The recurrence of the statement that Miss Zion has no comforter (w. 2, 9; also 16, 17, 21) is noteworthy, because it forms the background to the proclamation in Isaiah 40:1, 'Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.'

120

121

2	The angry God   Read Lamentations 2:1-15
The anger of Israel's God is a prominent motif in the second poem. It is the reason why wrongdoing issued in disaster. In Hebrew the word most commonly rendered 'anger' is also a word for the nose or face, so it suggests the feelings expressed in an angry look or an angry snort. The 'wrath' of verse 2 suggests something that overflows, the bursting out of temper. The fierceness of verse 3 and the wrath of verse 4 are words which suggest white-hot burning rage; hence its being likened to fire in both verses. The fierceness of verse 6 suggests the indignation of someone who feels they have been treated with gross inappropriateness.
Two realities underlie this bold talk of Yahweh's anger. One is the experience of being on the receiving end of it. We know when someone has lashed out at us in fury; we have felt the results. Miss Zion was not starting from theological theory in speaking of Yahweh being angry with her, but from what had happened. The other reality is the typical Israelite conviction that Yahweh is a person, with all a person's passion. In a paradoxical way the bad news of Yahweh's fierce indignation which issues in snorting temper and overflows in burning rage undergirds the good news that Yahweh has the other passions of love and compassion.
This second poem expresses the human horror of what had happened to Jerusalem: see, for example, verses 11-12. We may feel that this horror exceeded the destruction of its buildings and the loss of its honour. But the dagger that pierced to the city's heart was also the disproving of the vision which it believed God had given it. We have noted that Isaiah 40 will in due course look back to Lamentations 1. Lamentations 2:15 itself looks back to confessions of faith such as Psalm 48:2. They have been discredited. In reality there were few people who happened to walk past Jerusalem (v. 15). Jerusalem is not on a main road. The questioners of verse 15 are the externalization of the city's own people. The city's fall has raised yet-unanswered questions about their own beliefs.

3	Is there still hope?   Read Lamentations 3:1, 16-30
After the focus on Miss Zion, the 'I am the man' of verse 1 is a surprise. Lamentations 3 is especially reminiscent of the laments in the Psalter, the laments of Jeremiah, or the portrait of Yahweh's servant in Isaiah 53, though this man continues to talk about Yahweh rather than to speak to Yahweh.
In the Psalms, affliction can be described from three angles: it is what I experience, what my enemy has brought about, and what you (Yahweh) have done or not done. Here the first-person experience recurs, but the third- and second-person verbs frighteningly merge. The enemy who attacks is the Yahweh who is usually addressed, and there is therefore no one whom it is realistic to address. Splendour is not the only thing that has gone: so has hope (w. 16-18).
If this were Jeremiah 20 or Psalm 88, that might be an end, and the bulk of verses 19-21 would only make the hopelessness deeper. In the Psalms, again, 'remembering' is a resource: remembering Yahweh's past faithfulness may feel poignant in the present, but it can encourage. Lamentations 3 remembers not Yahweh's past faithfulness but the poet's pain.
The reversal in the final word of verse 21 therefore astonishes. The poet turns out to be one who has indeed looked hurt and loss steadfastly in the face, but then (in the manner of Psalm 22) refused to let it have the last word. If the recognition of wrongdoing in chapters 1 and 2 is meant, one thing it does is assert an ongoing conviction that the universe runs in a meaningful way. Calamity is not meaningless, and if Yahweh is passionately angry, this is not because of a mere fickle temper. Alongside the passion of anger is, indeed:
•	Yahweh's commitment (that which initiates or maintains a
relationship against all odds)
•	Yahweh's compassion (like the feelings of a mother for her child)
•	Yahweh's faithfulness (a consistency which does unfailingly keep
its word)
•	Yahweh's goodness dike the goodness of the world when it was
created) (w. 22-25)
So expectancy, seeking, hope, and acceptance are possible (w. 26-30).
123

 

4 What comes from Yahweh's heart and from ours
Read Lamentations 3:31-42
Isaiah has already used all Lamentations' words for anger but has then added that acting in anger is Yahweh's 'strange work'; it is 'alien' to Yahweh's true nature (Isaiah 28:21). Lamentations' way of making the point is to affirm that Yahweh acts both in anger and in compassion, but to declare that the former, the casting off and bringing grief and afflicting, are things Yahweh does 'unwillingly' (v. 33). Literally, they do not come from Yahweh's heart or mind or inner being. They are not what Yahweh is like inside. This statement occurs in the line which brings us to the very centre of the central poem of the five which make up the book.
By implication, such a conviction is grounds for the exhortation to repentance that follows. Such repentance has a number of features. It involves:
•	searching out and willingly exposing things that we know we
have hidden, from ourselves as much as from others (v. 40a)
•	turning away from one person (or from persons such as other
deities) to another: the most common Hebrew word for
repentance is one which literally means 'turn' and thus draws
attention to its being a matter of action, not merely feeling
(v. 40b)
'  reaching out to God with mind (so this is not a mere outward gesture or pretence) and hands (so this is public as well as private: it involves the whole person) (v. 41)
It also involves a verbal owning of what we have done. This week I have been to see the film One Fine Day. Among many neat moments, one scene has one of the couple who are on their way to falling in love forcing the other actually to utter the words, 'I cannot manage on my own'. These words are hard to say, and are withdrawn as soon as uttered. For some of us words can be cheap, for others they can be very expensive.
Here the words are (more literally) 'we ourselves really have rebelled' (v. 42a). The poet uses two different words for 'rebel' to emphasize the point: even one of these words on its own would express one of Hebrew's strongest ways of thinking of wrongdoing.
It indicates that we personally take responsibility for our active repudiation of our commitment to Yahweh.

5   Failed promises to city and king   
Read Lamentations 4:12-22
The arrangement of Lamentations as a whole is more circular than linear. We have seen that the centre of chapter 3 expresses its highpoints of theology and spirituality. For much of the latter part of the book we revert to pained (and more concrete) descriptions of the reduction of the city.
The challenge to faith is expressed in a new way. The city was supposed to be not merely an object of beauty and a reason for joy (2:15) but an impregnable fortress (4:12). As an architectural masterpiece it was actually less remarkable than other cities of the ancient world, but as a fortress it had some claim. The Jebusites had located it on an easily defensible, rocky spur, and David knew what he was doing in making it his own capital. More significant for its strength, however, was the fact that Yahweh had made a commitment to it, promising to make it a resting place and throne 'for ever' (Psalm 132:14). Once more, the real problem lying behind verse 12 is not the confounding of the beliefs of foreigners but the confounding of Israel's own faith.
Parallel to Yahweh's commitment to Zion in Psalm 132 is Yahweh's commitment to David and his successors as the anointed kings of Jerusalem. In owning that people's hopes in this promise have been disappointed, the poet at last makes the disappointment their own rather than projecting it on to others: 'We thought...' (v. 20).
In due course the city of Jerusalem will be rebuilt, but the city will never again be enough of a magnet to bring all its sons and daughters back. In due course Davidic princes will again aspire to its throne, but prophets will be able to picture the unimaginable in envisioning a perfectly satisfactory future without kings. There are limits to the vision that can be attached to a city or a dynastic line. After President Kennedy's death, one of his supporters said, 'We will laugh again, but we will not be young again.' Jerusalem will laugh again, but it will not be young again.
Conversely the final verses of chapter 4 have to confront the insight in Lamentations 3:33 regarding priorities within Yahweh's
nature. That statement spoke of what was in God's heart for human beings in general; it did not overtly confine itself to Israel. So it applies to Edom, too.

124

125

6   The unique and the repeated   Read Lamentations 5:1-22
I have been asked why the five poems in Lamentations were not included in the Psalter. If they had been so included, I doubt whether we would have thought them out of place. I suspect that they were kept separate because they were used on their own in Israel's worship. In the Hebrew Old Testament they are one of the 'Five Scrolls', with Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Esther. Each of these scrolls is used at a particular occasion in the Jewish year. Thus, even today, Lamentations is used on the Ninth of Av, in July-August, in commemorating the fall of Jerusalem in 587BC and in ad70. There were already such solemn commemorations in the sixth century bc (see Zechariah 7:3, 5) and it would not be surprising if these poems were used on such occasions. Whereas the Psalms have been preserved in such a way as to exclude any indication of particular events which might have stimulated their prayers and praises, the poems in Lamentations have been preserved in such a way as explicitly to commemorate the event of the fall of Jerusalem.
Yet this final lament brings the five to a close in a way which most recalls the Psalms. Lamentations 5 would be quite in place in the Psalter. The threefold grief to which we referred in connection with 3:1-30 appears here in full. The specific appeals are those of the Psalms: remember, look, restore, renew. The theological assertion is that of the Psalms (see v. 19). The question is that of the Psalms (see v. 20). The fear is that of the Psalms (see v. 22). The boldness of coming to such a negative close or non-close is that of the Psalms (compare Psalm 88).
In connection with Lamentations 4 we said that Lamentations was circular rather than linear. This turns out to have been an oversimplification. The effect of the final poem is to take us to the end of a journey from the specificity of the dreadful experience through which people have gone as Jerusalem fell, to the recognition that this fits within the experience that the people have had through the centuries, and that has continued to be Jerusalem's experience. This is a kind of further grief, but a kind of reassurance and comfort.

GUIDELINES
These poems/prayers are designed to express the pain, loss, grief, uncertainty, hopelessness, hope, repentance, longing, trust, at-a-loss-ness, and anxiety of a community that has gone through disaster. If you belong to a church or a city or a society that has had that experience, then they are for you to identify with. If not, then put yourself into the position of such a community, perhaps one you are acquainted with or one you know of from the television news, perhaps Jerusalem itself, and read these poems for it.
Further reading
R. Davidson, Jeremiah Volume II with Lamentations: Daily Study Bible, St Andrew Press 1985.
W.J. Fuerst, The Books of Ruth, Esther, Ecclesiastes, the Songs of Solomon, Lamentations: Cambridge Bible, Cambridge University Press 1975.
R.B. Salters, Jonah and Lamentations: JSOT Study Guides, Sheffield Academic Press 1994.

126

127